Flowery language and saccharine family values turn what may have been a potent world drama into a watered down, mildly effective family saga. Inspired by Khaled Hosseini's best selling novel of the same name, The Kite Runner tells the story of Amir, (Khalid Abdalla) a man who must return to his childhood home of Kabul in order to rescue the son of his oldest friend, Hassan. The two parted ways early in their youth following a traumatic event in the life of Hassan that drives a wedge between the two friends.We begin the film with an extended flashback of the two boys that is sometimes lovely and elsewhere both oddly soft and weirdly indelicate. One the one hand, the two boys live in a "life is good" bubble of comradery and speechy, almost unbelievably articulate expressions of mutual respect between them. But they are also subject to severe torment and pressures of violence from their peers and authority figures. The film's visual language simply does not have the nuance to support such radical shifts in tone. It walks and talks like a sweet family drama and when events of violence and rape crush the children's innocence, it doesn't sting with the pain of broken youth but instead just feels muddled and melodramatic. It simply does not handle these severe matters with enough sympathy and sophistication, creating a rather crude and dull setup to the film.
When we return to Kabul with an adult Amir (a far more interestingly realized character), the film takes some shape and finds its true narrative center. The mission of Amir to locate and rescue Hassan's orphaned son amidst a Taliban controlled Kabul embodies the kind of verve and suspense that this story has the potential to offer us. It also abandons the more glossy coating that wrecks the film's first half and finally opens itself to the dark realities at its feet. Director Marc Forster, who seems to be oscillating here between his Finding Neverland loveliness and Monster's Ball grittiness, just doesn't seem to know when to be grim and when to be serene. And most problematically, he cannot comfortably shift between the two. The result is an awkward hybrid that works for this segment of the film and this segment alone. Two charming child actors (Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada and Zekeria Ebrahimi) carry the first half of the film ably enough to make it watchable, but Forster turns the film's conclusion into a "peace and love" coda that dampens and dishonors the serious turn of events that precedes it. It supposes that simply by moving on to greener pastures, all of the characters of the film will be cleansed of the pains of their past. The film hinges on the notion that the past clings onto us no matter how much time and distance we put between us and it. It's this haunting sense of guilt that sends Amir on this great and dangerous journey home. Yet when we reach the end, it's as if all the danger and brutality has vanished. Somehow out of sight suddenly means out of mind, and the characters share in a frustratingly simple celebration that offers no greater, deeper response to the more serious subjects here.
This is a film burdened by a desperation to be wholesome enough to compete in a league with other commercial family dramas, but at its heart it is designed to be an art minded tragedy. The two sides of this equation are never quite reconciled and despite strong performances and an often gripping story, the film fails on most counts. It's a case where the pieces exceed the whole. The performers are all working at top form and Hosseini's tale is rich with worthwhile material, but Forster and equally guilty screenwriter David Benioff settle too easily on the softest possible route, resulting in a film too grimacing to really serve as a family piece and too candy coated to please cinema enthusiasts. They tried admirable to make an authentic, historically accurate film in realistic looking locales (in this case a doubling China) and using the appropriate Dari language. They just did not commit as passionately to the story as needed to create a film that does justice to this larger than life tale of regret, betrayal, and redemption.
Grade: B-
